Hacker: Companies need big feature changes to avoid local maxima traps
Severin Hacker · Duolingo Co-Founder, Severin Hacker: How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Education · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · May 19, 2025 · at 1:38:28
Severin Hacker, co-founder and CTO of Duolingo, explains product experimentation strategy on 20VC.
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“The trap you can run into is you only run tiny experiments, right? Like on, on your purchase page or you run these tiny experiments on, on copy or something. And I think it's very important that you have your portfolio of changes. So you have lots of low risk, small changes, but you also have some big changes and a big change could be Adding chess or adding math. And that, that's how you stay innovative and relevant. You can't just, otherwise you end up in a local maxima where, you know, you can't get out because you optimize yourself into that.”
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